I don’t know where I would go right now to buy a drink. Even if I wanted one, which I assure you I don’t. But I am struck by the fact that I don’t know where I would go if I did. Where do people go for a drink? It’s 2 AM on a Saturday night, technically Sunday morning. There is no alcohol in my house, of course. This house has never had alcohol in it, in what is going on two and a half years now. Where do people go? I don’t remember.
Bars. I suppose they go to bars. Are there bars around here? I can’t think of any. I’ve never looked for them, nor asked about them, nor even noticed them in passing while doing something else, the things I do. The last bar I was in is 600 miles away. Even if I knew where one was around here, I wouldn’t know if it was open. Do bars close at a set time around here? In Pennsylvania they had rules about when bars could be open. They couldn’t be open all night, they had to close at some time, I think it was 3 AM, and they couldn’t open again until 7 AM. I could have the details wrong, but they definitely couldn’t stay open all night. You could never spend more than, say, 20 hours straight in a bar. I never did that. I never spent more than the usual amount of time that one spends in bars. How much time is that? I don’t remember.
This guy is walking down the street, and he falls into a hole. Later he calls up to a friend who jumps in with him. It occurs to me that I’ve never told this story from the friend’s point of view. He wakes up that day, same as any other, and he’s just walking down the street, minding his own business, when he hears a familiar voice from an unexpected direction. He’s probably on his way to something he thought was important when he started, but he hears this voice and he stops what he was doing and he jumps in the hole.
I have a memory of having seen alcohol recently, somewhere, doing the things I do. Where was it? I remember now. There’s a wine and beer aisle in the upscale supermarket where we shop for groceries. Every two weeks, I pass by rows and rows of wine and beer. Or possibly just wine, but I’m almost certain there’s also beer on the other side, it’s a divided aisle, one side has wine and more wine, and the other side I think has beer, but I don’t walk on that side so I don’t pass it directly so I don’t remember exactly. I pass by the wine to get to the seltzer. D drinks seltzer religiously, and I drink it occasionally, mostly after running my 5-mile loop around the neighborhood, or after coming home from exercising with my father at the YMCA.
I don’t know of a middle ground. I’ve heard that some people, most people, exist in a middle ground. I don’t understand people like that.
It is also possible that our supermarket would not sell me wine or beer right now, at this second, because it’s a Sunday. Pennsylvania had some rule like that, they had a lot of strange rules like that. Some places were not allowed to sell wine or beer at all, like supermarkets. Supermarkets could not sell alcohol in any form. If you wanted beer, you had to go to a beer distributor, and if you wanted wine or hard liquor, you had to go to a liquor store. All the liquor stores were state-owned, and all the beer distributors were only allowed to sell you cases, not singles or six-packs. I heard once that this was a vestige of the Prohibition Era. After Prohibition was repealed, some states were pissed about it being repealed, and they set up strange rules to discourage drinking because they couldn’t get away with banning it outright. Rules like: make people buy a case at a time, and give the state a monopoly on everything else so that nobody but the government could profit from sin. Supermarkets can’t sell it at all. Other places can sell it, but not on Sundays. The distributors were like that. A case at a time, but not on Sundays.
It’s an arc, and this is one point on the arc. I no longer know enough about the world around me to get drunk. That I don’t want to is not the point. I don’t even remember how.
I don’t know where I would go right now to get a cigarette. None of my friends smoke, so I couldn’t bum one even if they were up, which they’re not. I suppose I could go to a gas station, but I realize I’ve never been inside a gas station around here. They all pay-at-the-pump, and barring bathroom emergencies and cigarettes, there’s really no reason to go inside. I think they also sell cigarettes at our upscale supermarket. In fact, I know they do, because I remember hearing at one point that the only difference between our upscale supermarket and the really upscale Whole Foods market across the street is that Whole Foods would never sell cigarettes. They do, however, sell wine. I remember that now too. They have it next to the cheese. We bought upscale cheese once, that’s why I remember.
I have managed to completely isolate myself. In a world where alcohol is legal and tobacco is one of my home state’s leading crops, I can’t for the life of me figure out how I could smoke or drink right now. I am trapped in sobriety, sheltered by blinders of my own creation. It’s time to take them off. Not so I can buy a drink or have a smoke, but because I’m not the guy in the hole anymore. One day I’m going to be minding my own business, doing the things I do, and I’m going to hear a familiar voice from an unexpected direction. And if I’m not careful I’m going to walk right past him.
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